Google analytics interface - fantastic

OK, so your site is all designed and optimised. All that traffic is coming screaming to your (virtual) front door now. Well done!

Except, they stay for 10 seconds and leave the site.

But there's really no excuse not to use Google analytics, and they're absolutely free.

And I have to confess they've saved my bacon and that of my clients

You see: search optimisation is a relatively straightforward activity: follow certain rules, apply them to your site and you can expect traffic to come to your site. (OK, its a bit more involved and ongoing, but you can see huge results from relatively simple initial steps).

But you need traffic analytics to actually determine how people are interacting with your site. This is not SEO, but rather Internet Marketing, but it does improve your overall reputational score and therefore your rankings. Things that have really benefitted me hugely:

a) Merging or deleting files with low click-through. This improves your overall "time on site" statistics and page/search relevance. (I kid you not, I merged 9 files for a client which had about 6 clickthroughs a month each,into 3 files relevant to a specific subject, EACH of which obtained over 59 clicks in the remaining 2 weeks of the month.)

b) Tuning page contents and navigation. If your page is exhibiting high "bounce rate" and low "time on page", then you need to tune your contents and navigation. High bounce rate says people are leaving the site without doing anything else on site. "Time on page" is exactly what it suggests: the length of time people are staying on a particular page. Ideally you want a low bounce rate (<40% is good) and a representative time on page (I can't give you an ideal figure: but perhaps time yourself reading through your page contents and if people are generally exiting well before that, then your content is not appealing).

c) Determining where people are exiting your site. Google stats show you (% Exit) where people are leaving your site. Of course everybody leaves your site at some point. Ideally you want them to leave having taken an action - if you have any sort of action confirmation page (e.g. A thank-you message for contacting you), this is the best one to have the highest % exit from. Any pages prior to that are worse news, depending on your content and desired action.

I'll post a separate article on "how" to tune your content - things to look for.